The Beatles - "Beatles Again"

In 1969, new Beatles manager Allen Klein negotiated a new contract with Capitol Records that required one compilation album per year. I don't know how they planned to have a new compilation every year for the five-year span of the contract, but the plan for the initial one was to use songs that hadn't appeared on albums (only singles).

Allan Steckler was given the task of deciding which tracks should be included. Ten tracks were chosen, put in chronological order, from 1964-69, and issued (only in the U.S.) as Hey Jude in 1970. With the inclusion of the group's most successful song ever (the title song), the album promptly sold more than 2 million copies.

The problem with the album is that the Beatles' sound had changed so dramatically from the time of their mop top days of 1964 and their hippie days of '69. With a little more care, a compilation album could have been produced with a more contemporary sound using more recent songs, including some still unreleased.

SIDE A

1. Revolution

2. Lady Madonna

3. The Inner Light

4. What's the New Mary Jane?

5. Not Guilty

6. The Ballad of John and Yoko

SIDE B

1. Hey Jude

2. Old Brown Shoe

3. Don't Let Me Down

4. You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)

The first four tracks of Hey Jude are the ones I have the problem with: "Can't Buy Me Love," "I Should Have Known Better," "Paperback Writer" and "Rain." Removing these, I needed a new opener. "Revolution" -- which closes side one on Hey Jude -- seems like the obvious choice to me. I then moved "Lady Madonna" from track 6 to track 2. 

I added three songs to the first side not on the original album: "The Inner Light," "What's the New Mary Jane?" and "Not Guilty." All seem like obvious tracks to include. "The Inner Light" didn't show up on an American or British album until 1978's Rarities and the stereo version wasn't released until 10 years after that on Past Masters, Volume 2. Both "What's the New Mary Jane?" and "Not Guilty" were White Album outtakes that weren't released until Anthology 3 in 1996.

For the final song on the first side, I moved the Hey Jude album closer "The Ballad of John and Yoko" here instead.

The first three tracks of the second side are the same as Hey Jude, but I closed the album with "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)." Originally the b-side of the then-upcoming "Let It Be" single, this track wasn't released on an album until Rarities in 1978.

There were three other tracks I considered: the single edit versions of both "Let It Be" and "Get Back," and the "wildlife" version of "Across the Universe" that had only been released previously on the World Wildlife Fund compilation No One's Gonna Change Our World. But since all three songs in different versions would appear on the Let It Be album released later the same year, it didn't seem to make as much sense as the other options. 

And there you have it, what I consider to be a superior compilation album than Hey Jude. For a cover, I used the shot of the group that was on the back side of the Hey Jude album, and I titled it Beatles Again, which is rumored to have been the original album title. I found this album mock-up on the web.